Napping for Tigers

         

American Bittern                           17 May 2009

Spring is an odd phenomenon in Northern Wisconsin, at least when on the outside, looking in.   It slumbers, lingers, idles, and then, all at once, it erupts with exponential power.  Everything turns green overnight, and shoots and leaves grow at a ridiculous rate.  From the inside, looking out, it makes perfect sense. There is urgency in the growing season up here, and plants make a hormone-orchestrated, weather-calculated physiological dash toward another year’s survival.  It is during this peak growth in green when marsh birds become most determined to complete another year’s mating cycle.  The life of a bittern is much like Spring.

 

 

 One of the most fascinating birds of the marsh is the American Bittern, Botaurus lentiginosus.  The bird is a close kin of the true herons and egrets, but it has carved a biological path of its own.  Around here, it is known only from pristine sedge marsh habitats in this day and age, and it is often known only by its resonating, mechanical, pumping call.  Most who hear it cannot fathom that it is a bird, and birders following a call often find frustration in all attempts to locate it visually.  The Ojibwe word for this bird is “Mooska osi” which refers to the call. Archie Mosay, a beloved local Ojibwe-speaking Anishinaabe elder, used to tell of how the bittern and heron were competing for a place to hunt.  While the heron was larger, the bittern was tenacious and drove the heron away.  The bittern’s call said, “Mii sa’iw, Mii sa’iw.”  In Ojibwe it translates to “That’s it.  That’s it.”

 

There are some tricks to finding a bittern.  First, it must be known that in all of the acoustic artistry, all of the resonance and echo, this bird is closer than you think.   Stand as still as a bittern.  Scan the marsh slowly, patiently, hunting in the foreground as much as the background.  The tiger is there.  Perhaps you will see it.  It is, perhaps, the oddly shaped tussock of sedges just ahead. To find a bittern, you must, at least a little, imitate a bittern.

 

 Also, there is the little trick of getting to the marsh when the wiregrass sedges are still lying low and the bitterns are newly arriving on territory, displaying aggressively and openly with white plume tufts raised and necks stretched long.   I have seen bitterns defying all camouflage, sticking out to be noticed.

 

Last, there is my favorite trick of all.  Go out late at night in May when the moon sets mists to a cool gray white and the last sane person has tucked in exhausted.  Your clock should have already passed 1 AM.  There, entranced by nocturnal songs of Virginia Rail, Sora, Swamp Sparrow, Gray Treefrog, American Toad, and, just maybe, Yellow Rail, you will hear the “pumper-lunking” calls deep and reverberating in the marsh.  Mark the spot and know it well.  Tomorrow, at sunrise, you will be exhausted but there again.  Perfect.

 

Exhaustion is prerequisite to a deep and untroubled sleep in the cramped confines of a photo blind.  Returning to last night’s thunder-pumper vocalizations, now in the early light of sunrise, the car coasts in slowly, stealthily along a gravel road.  The reason for the nocturnal sound-scape has become clear in the growing daylight. An endless sedge marsh, streaked by muskrat runs and deer trails, holds an abundance of animals.   A small drainage ditch at the edge of the marsh holds frogs, small fish, and a hard edge built perfectly for an ambush hunter.   The car rolls up to the very edge of the gravel road, perched on the opposite side of the tiger’s favorite hunt.  The key turns silent, the brake is set, and, in a few moments, the blind is set up.  The tiger’s ambush spot has become my own.  Exhaustion speaks, so I lay back in the rising dust of last year’s dead grasses, I close my eyes, and I enter a deep sleep. 

 

I awake with a cloudy contact lens and a dry mouth.  I rinse my eye with solution and my mouth with a bottle of water.  A quick side-to-side crack of the neck, a shrug of the shoulder, and I roll up to my hunting stool.  Peering cautiously out of my small window, I quickly realize that it has all worked.  Two bitterns, marshland tigers, are hunting stealthily just a few feet away at the other side of the channel.  I have succeeded at “napping for tigers.”  The only way to beat a bittern at its own game is to “check out” for a while and wait. 

As I count my many blessings and begin to work the opportunity into imagery, I suddenly am astounded to realize my good fortunes.  One is a male.  One is a female.  The male begins to twist his head around in a strange and revolting sort of way, puffing his digestive esophagus full of air. (Want to hear me burp my a-b-c’s?)  With a quick tapping of his mandibles, he begins the magical sound, “Tap, Tap, Tap…Pump-er-lunk! Pump-er-lunk! Pump-er-woo-wooo!”   His white plumes are raised above his shoulders like the epaulets of royalty, and his lores, the naked spots between his eye and nostril, have grown deeply pink.   He stretches his wing, revealing a world of patterned wonder.

 

 

The hard work of a morning’s nap has paid off.  I have been treated to a show that is only possible when one lives the laboriously slow life of the bittern long enough to see that such a life is filled with moments of riveting drama and deep meaning.  It has slumbered like Spring.  It has raced to action with exponential fervor.  I never knew they had those pink lores.   

 

 

The color and energy of Spring errupts on the wings of birds.  Cape May Warblers visit the sap wells on my weeping willow, and Chestnut-sided Warblers busily declare territories from the budding hazel bushes.   White-crowned Sparrows skirt the Great Lakes as they move onward to Canada.   As I see the pink blossoms of crab apples, I am reminded of secret colors in the lores of my tigers of the marsh.  I can't help but feel smug in knowing such a secret.

 

 

 

 

To learn more about the Great Lake’s wonderful Ojibwe heritage, be sure to purchase a copy of Anton Treuer’s book, “Living Our Language.”  To use his and his brother’s terminology, Anton is a precious person in my community, and he has done wonderful things to preserve the memories and the language of Anishinaabe elders.  These images were made with the Canon Rebel XTi in 2009.  I used one of my trusted Canon 300mm f4 IS pro lenses, and some images were also made using a Canon fluorite 1.4X converter.  The nap was free.  Miigwetch Mooska’osi! Mino giizhigad, geget! Asema biindakoojige nimiigwetchiyag!